Jahiliyyah (Arabic: ‏جَاهِلِيَّة‎‎ ǧāhiliyyah/jāhilīyah "ignorance") is an Islamic concept of the period of time and state of affairs in Arabia before the advent of Islam.[1] It is often translated as the "Age of Ignorance".[1] The term jahiliyyah is derived from the verbal root jahala "to be ignorant or stupid, to act stupidly".[2] In modern times various Islamic thinkers have used the term to criticize what they saw as un-Islamic nature of public and private life in the Muslim world.[3] In current use, Jahiliyyah refers to secular modernity, as in the work of Abul A'la Maududi, who viewed modernity as the “new jahiliyyah.”[4]Sayyid Qutb viewed jahiliyyah as a state of domination of humans over humans, as opposed to their submission to God.[4] Radical groups have justified armed struggle against secular regimes as a jihad against jahiliyyah.[4]

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The term Jahiliyyah is used several places in the Quran, and translations often use various terms to represent it:

(3:154) Then, following misery, He sent down upon you a feeling of security, a slumber overcoming a party among you, while another party cared only for themselves, thinking false thoughts about God, thoughts fit for the Age of Idolatry.

(5:50) Do they truly desire the law of paganism? But who is fairer than God in judgment for a people firm of faith?

(33:33) Remain in your homes, and do not display your adornments, as was the case with the earlier Age of Barbarism.

(48:26) For the unbelievers had planted in their hearts a zealotry, the zealotry of lawlessness ...

This term can be used in reference to the Arabic culture before the arrival of Islam.

Before the Islamic conversion the Arab tribes were nomadic, with a strong community spirit and some specific society rules. Their culture was patriarchal, with rudimentary religious beliefs. Although there were some traces of monotheism in the "hanifs" figures, their religious beliefs were based mostly on idol adorations[5] and social congregations once a year around the Kaaba for trading and exchanges. Since the term is, in its deep sense, used as a condition, and not as an historical period,[6] the Jahiliyya is used to describe the period of ignorance and darkness that preluded the arrival of Islam. It refers to the general condition of those that haven't accepted the Muslim faith.

After the Bar Kochba Revolt of 132-135 CE, the Romans engaged in mass executions, expulsions, and enslavement, destroying large numbers of Judean towns and forbidding Jews from settling in Jerusalem, which was renamed Aelia Capitolina, or its environs (Dio Cassius, Roman History 69.12-14); there was no further Jewish government or overarching legal system thereafter in Judea, became normatively known as Syria Palestina; this effectively turned the expatriate Jews of the Diaspora into a permanently exiled people, deprived of their homeland. The exiled Jewish population went out of the Roman territories to the exile in Arabia Deserta.

In Arabic, the term "Diaspora", جالية‬ Jaliyyah (compare Hebrew: גולה‎ Golah[7]), is derived from the verb جلا‬ (compare Hebrew: גָּלָה‎ galah[8]). The term of that era was later scorned by Muslims to Jahiliyyah to refer to "ignorance" instead.[citation needed] The same mockery was used with Amr ibn Hishām "Abu al-Ḥakam" (أبو الحكم), ("Father of wisdom") who was called Abu Jahl (أبو جهل‎‎), ("Father of ignorance"); and with Maslamah bin Habib who was known as Musaylimah which means Mini-Maslamah.[9]

The term Jaliyyah (جالية) was used afterwards to refer to the Non-Muslims who should pay the Jizya.[10]

The term "modern Jahiliyyah" was coined by the Indian Islamist writer Abul Ala Maududi, who characterized modernity with its values, lifestyles, and political norms as "the new barbarity" which was incompatible with Islam.[1] Such criticisms of modernity were taken up in the emerging anti-colonialist rhetoric and the term gained currency in the Arab world through translations of Mawdudi's work.[1] The concept of modern Jahiliyyah attained wide popularity through a 1950 work by Mawdudi's student Abul Hasan Nadvi, titled What Did the World Lose Due to the Decline of Islam?[1] Expounding Mawdudi's views, Nadvi wrote that Muslims were to be held accountable for their predicament, because they came to rely on alien, un-Islamic institutions borrowed from the West.[1]

in Egypt, Sayyid Qutb popularized the term in his influential work Ma'alim fi al-Tariq "Milestones", which included the assertion that "the Muslim community has been extinct for a few centuries."[11]

When a person embraced Islam during the time of the Prophet, he would immediately cut himself off from Jahiliyyah. When he stepped into the circle of Islam, he would start a new life, separating himself completely from his past life under ignorance of the Divine Law. He would look upon the deeds during his life of ignorance with mistrust and fear, with a feeling that these were impure and could not be tolerated in Islam! With this feeling, he would turn toward Islam for new guidance; and if at any time temptations overpowered him, or the old habits attracted him, or if he became lax in carrying out the injunctions of Islam, he would become restless with a sense of guilt and would feel the need to purify himself of what had happened, and would turn to the Quran to mold himself according to its guidance. — Sayyid Qutb[12]

Jahiliyya [...] is the rule of humans by humans because it involves making some humans servants of others, rebelling against service to God, rejecting God's divinity (ulahiyya) and, in view of this rejection, ascribing divinity to some humans and serving them apart from God. [...] People—in any time and any place-are either governed by God's shari'a—entirely, without any reservations—accepting it and submitting to it, in which case they are following God's religion, or they are governed by a shari'a invented by humans, in whatever form, and accept it. In that case they are in jahiliyya [...]

Qutb further wrote: "The foremost duty of Islam in this world is to depose Jahiliyyah from the leadership of man, and to take the leadership into its own hands and enforce the particular way of life which is its permanent feature.[14]

Use of the term for modern Muslim society is usually associated with Qutb's other radical ideas (or Qutbism) -- namely that reappearance of Jahiliyya is a result of the lack of Sharia law, without which Islam cannot exist;[15] that true Islam is a complete system with no room for any element of Jahiliyya;[16] that all aspects of Jahiliyya ("manners, ideas and concepts, rules and regulations, values and criteria") are "evil and corrupt";[17] that Western and Jewish conspiracies are constantly at work to destroy Islam,[18] etc.

The Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir adds the concept of the caliphate to that of shariah law to insist that the Muslim world has been living in jahiliyya since the last caliphate was abolished in 1924 will not be free of it until it is restored.[19][20]

Jahiliyya is associated with iconoclasms. In 2015, the ancient history scholar Lucinda Dirven noted that in the ongoing destruction of antiquities by the Islamic State terrorist group, the religious rationale also covers for economic and political factors. "Cultural cleansing is a way to claim political power within a certain territory as well as control over history."[21] The assyriologist Eckart Frahm said, "Such iconoclasm is not specifically Islamic... What is quite unique in the case of ISIS is that the destruction is directed against images that are thousands of years old, often damaged, and no longer worshipped by anyone, and that there is a concerted effort to use these acts of vandalism as propaganda by broadcasting them through videos."[22][23]

^Eleanor Abdella Doumato (rev. Byron D. Cannon) (2009). "Jāhilīyah". In John L. Esposito. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Subscription required (help)). Since the twentieth century various movements, some with quite clear political agendas, have used the concept of Jāhilīyah to refer to what they deem to be an un-Islamic state of affairs affecting both private and public life in the Muslim world generally.